![]() It’s true that a 1994 state law requires Florida’s public schools to teach African American history, including the “enslavement experience, abolition, and the history and contributions of Americans of the African diaspora to society.” Florida’s Department of Education lists six African American history courses that meet the requirements of the 1994 law, but none of these courses fall under the heading of “ core-curricula”-the body of classes students must take in order to graduate from high school. ![]() That was the whole point of DeSantis’s high-profile press conference on the state’s teaching standards earlier this month, where he denounced the case made by his detractors as a “hoax.” “They will say things like ‘Florida does not want students to know that there was slavery in the United States,’ which is just an absolute lie,” DeSantis said. This procedural dodge, like so many of DeSantis’s pronouncements, is meant to preemptively disarm criticism: If he can make it seem that African American history is already required for all Florida students, the advocates of the “woke” sensibility DeSantis reviles will appear to be distorting the truth in the alleged service of their ideological agendas. ![]() In other words, while schools may be mandated to offer such courses, no student is required to take them. This ideologically driven agenda gives the lie to DeSantis’s frequent insistence that Florida’s education standards “require teaching Black history.” In point of fact, the standards require no such thing they categorize African American history as an elective.
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